Rep. Matt Gaetz has picked up some powerful allies in a demand for an inspector general’s probe of allegations that the intelligence community is spying on Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Gaetz, a Florida Republican who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, challenged the panel’s Democratic chairman, Rep. Jerry Nadler, to support the investigation.
“If Democrats don’t do this,” Gaetz said during a hearing on Wednesday, “if you’re only outraged when your members and your staff and the press that’s close to you and that amplifies your messages is targeted, then we never are going to solve anything.”
So far, it seems, Nadler and other Democrats are taking a pass.
But other Republicans aren’t.
Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, and James Comer of Kentucky, the senior GOP member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, have supported Gaetz’s demand for an internal National Security Agency investigation, according to the Washington Examiner.
“Mr. Carlson’s disclosures about the NSA’s actions are serious, and the NSA’s elusive response demands further inquiry. We ask that the OIG [Office of Inspector General] immediately review whether the NSA collected, possessed, or obtained Mr. Carlson’s electronic communications and report to the Committee about this matter,” Gaetz, Jordan and Comer wrote in a latter Thursday to the NSA’s IG, Robert Storch.
The trio asked that the probe be unclassified in order “to ensure public transparency.”
Carlson made the allegations on Monday night.
He said on the air that a whistleblower inside the NSA informed him that its operatives had sensitive information Carlson had compiled. The only way the NSA could know what it did, Carlson said, was if it monitored his emails and texts.
The NSA responded by maintaining that Carlson was not a “target,” and it denied Carlson’s additional claim that the agency was going to leak material to get his show booted off the air.
Gaetz challenged that on Wednesday.
“What’s interesting is there is no denial that they were monitoring Tucker Carlson, even if he wasn’t the target,” Gaetz said during the Judiciary Committee hearing. “There’s probably somebody in Tucker Carlson’s orbit that NSA was monitoring. And there’s no denial that they caught up Tucker Carlson in that monitoring.”
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